Here Comes A Special Boy

To jail.

November 2nd, 2023

Before I went to sleep last night I read Liz’s Verge post on the closing arguments in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, and then I dreamed that when they march Sam into the Federal penitentiary where he is definitely headed for a long time, everyone will stand at the door of their cell and in beautiful harmony sing “hErE cOmEs the ✨𝐵𝑜𝓎 ✨,” so I guess that’s where my brain is at.

An absolutely incredible photo collage of the type that you only get when I neglect to ask either of my skilled graphics interns for help and instead make a graphic myself using only Preview, of Phillippe from Achewood walking along with his shoes saying “Here comes a special boy” but his face is a courtroom sketch of SBF and he’s (supposed to be) walking into a prison.

You never know what a jury is going to do, but all signs point to this one not being keen on the “I’m just a little birthday boy with glasses!” defense. The jury is currently deliberating, and if they don’t decide he’s guilty as hell by 8:15pm tonight they will resume on Monday.

The House of Representatives’ Special Boy George Santos effortlessly survived an attempt to expel him last night, with surprise support from a few Democrats including Katie Porter. Porter released a statement explaining her vote which read: “Lol, lmao.” A triumphant Santos told reporters “I feel like due process is still alive,” and then claimed that his father invented cheese. Every reporter at the press gaggle later discovered that their credit cards had been used to purchase several thousand dollars worth of Franklin Mint collectible coins.

Today in Infinite Steves:

Ethan Mollick tweeted: ”The thing about LLMs that make them unintuitive is that analogizing them to having a scifi AI is less useful than thinking of them as infinite copies of some guy named Steve, a grad student who is great at coding & art and is widely-read, but makes up stuff when he is pressed.”

What are the infinite Steves up to? Solving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, for one thing:

CulturePulse’s multi-agent AI model… will ultimately create a virtual version of each and every one of the 15 million people who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories, each imbued with demographics, religious beliefs, and moral values that echo their real-world counterparts…

Oh absolutely, yeah. The team behind this model previously used their Steves to predict that “the introduction of a hard border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK… would result in a rise in paramilitary activity,” which was very surprising to everyone who thought the Good Friday Agreement was when the British and Irish governments got together to announce that everybody’s workin’ for the weekend.

Nitasha Tiku, Kevin Schaul and Szu Yu Chen found that despite Stability AI claiming to have made “a significant investment in reducing bias in its latest model” Stable Diffusion’s Steves are still out here pumping out the most stereotypical junk you’ve ever seen.

For example, in 2020, 63 percent of food stamp recipients were White and 27 percent were Black, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Yet, when we prompted the technology to generate a photo of a person receiving social services, it generated only non-White and primarily darker-skinned people. Results for a “productive person,” meanwhile, were uniformly male, majority White, and dressed in suits for corporate jobs.

Steve, you rascal. FT’s Song Jung-a and Christian Davies report that South Korean churches are increasingly turning to Steve to write their prayers and sermons. I guess it’s “Adam and Steve” after all. And the BBC asked a bunch of women why they aren’t using Steve as much as men do. The women uniformly answered that they are much more skilled then Steve, and can do better work with less effort on their own.

While all these seem valid reasons to give [Steve] a wide berth, [Steve] expert Jodie Cook says there are deeper, more ingrained reasons why women are not embracing the technology as much as men.

"Stem fields [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] have traditionally been dominated by males," says Ms Cook, who is the founder of Coachvox.[steve], an app that allows business leaders to create [Steves] of themselves.

I’m not sure what STEM skills it takes to type “big titty weed spiderman” into a text box, but go off Jodie. Another successful woman in tech explaining why she doesn’t need Steve is Signal President Meredith Whittaker at Washington Post’s Steve Summit:

Here Comes A Special Planetary Boy:

For decades, scientists have been baffled by two large, mysterious blobs in Earth’s mantle…

New computer modelling supports a dramatic origin story for these strange blobs: they are artefacts of a gargantuan collision 4.5 billion years ago between early Earth and another young planet — the same collision thought to have formed the Moon.

Obviously the ancient side-swiper should be called Melancholia but it’s not. As a consolation the researchers do offer this upsetting video of how they think it might have gone:

Early frame from the computer model video, showing “Theia” (blech) just beginning to embed into the larger sphere of the Earth. Click through to play, the simulation is neat.

…Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant. Most adblockers are browser extensions that are most widely used on Chrome, which is a Google product and the most popular browser in the world. They are being used to block ads sold by Google, the largest ad company in the world. And they are specifically being used to block ads on YouTube, a Google-owned website that is also one of the largest websites on Earth. 

Tommy Tuberville possibly not as special a boy as he thought. Free the booty patrol! “Orcas Are Learning Terrifying New Behaviors,” like discourse and cancel culture. Ruck’s truck fucked.

Today’s Important Question: 

Kyle tweeted “do we have a name for the relentlessly shitty period of history we're going through yet?”

Today’s Song: Charli XCX, “Backseat” (feat. Carly Rae Jepsen)

I don’t know why today’s tabs are so heavily Phillippe-coded. Music Intern Sam is a special boy. Thanks to Senior Contributing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley who I know would have done a much better job on that graphic if I had asked. Open thread tomorrow! Subscribe to vibe. Want to know a secret? Come here. The real special boy? It’s—1

Amy Ash: “if you stay long enough after the paw patrol 2 credits you get to meet the real police”

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